Software Engineer @Apple | CNCF Governing Board | Previously @Rancher_Labs and CNCF TOC | All things infrastructure
Mountain View, California
Joined April 2010
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Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
I'm starting to sense a divide in the tech industry:
- People thriving on autonomy who are reinventing how they work and what tools they use with AI: LOTS of work, but they're enjoying it and getting very efficient
- People used to being mentored / trained / or simply told what to do and how. Frustrated with the lack of guidance from management on what to do with AI; also frustrated by seeing some of their peers thriving; increasingly bitter about AI and the state of the industry, as a whole
Neither group seems to be aware that there's another group, or have empathy for the other group
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
I think many of us working in tech tend to forget that the reason software engineering vs other engineering fields pays (a lot!) more, is a lot more flexible (WFH/remote), and has better perks:
Because this field changes much faster than other engineering fields. The premium is because fewer people are able/willing to pick up new technologies, methodologies so quickly.
But the field had ~10-20 years of stability, and so lots of folks forgot this is why a premium exists. And that AI is just another tech wave: software engineers who pick it up and master it will generally fare better; those not will struggle a lot more.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
Underrated life advice: Keep a list of the people who believed in you early. The teacher who pushed you. The boss who took a chance. The friend who told you to go for it. Every now and then, reach out. Update them. And tell them just how much you appreciate what they did for you.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
Being 45 is such a strange experience.
One minute, you want to make more money, get ridiculously fit, reinvent your entire life, and become the healthiest version of yourself.
The next minute, you want to disappear into the mountains for three weeks, turn your phone off, avoid everyone, and remember what peace feels like.
You want adventure, but you also want your own bed.
You want to be productive, but you also want to cancel every plan you’ve made.
You want to build wealth, travel the world, and accomplish big things, but you also consider 8:30 p.m. a perfectly reasonable bedtime.
And honestly? A mug of hot chocolate, a cozy blanket, and absolutely nobody asking you for anything sounds like the ultimate luxury.
Is this what getting older feels like, or have I just reached the age where peace and quiet are the real definition of success? 😂
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
It's so easy to build but somehow none of us has time to focus on anything. This is a dream for anyone with ADHD, a hell for everyone else.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
We still want to find a way to bring the community together. If you planned to be in California for the Grace Hopper Celebration, I invite you to join us this year for GitHub Universe, Oct 28-29. 🌉
We've set aside 75 complimentary passes for folks with cancelled registrations. While this doesn't replace the conference and Universe has far fewer attendees than GHC, my hope is that it does give folks an opportunity to connect with each other. 📷 DM the GitHub team on LinkedIn or email me at [email protected] (first come first serve).
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
If you had a ticket to Grace Hopper and have not cancelled your plans to go to San Francisco, go to @github's LinkedIn right now if you'd like to attend GitHub Universe for free ❤️
Grace Hopper Celebration Canceled: A Big Loss For Women In Tech This Year buff.ly/ZwOSpB6
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
The older I get, the more I realize that the single greatest challenge for any ambitious person is eliminating the guilt associated with free time and rest.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
Let's talk a little more about Margaret Hamilton because she deserves it
In 1961, Margaret Hamilton was tackling massive systems, having previously wrangled room-sized computers that blared like a foghorn whenever they crashed.
Her fix wasn’t just to patch the bug. Everytime there was a crash, she took a Polaroid of the programmer who wrote it, and a note on the mistake. That way, if it ever happened again, they wouldn't be starting from scratch. They could note patterns and the last person who triaged that failure could help.
This is a critical aspect of what she gave us. She didn’t stop at fixing errors. She studied their patterns so she could see them coming. She called them “the enemy,” and she meant it.
Initially, when she was working on failure modes, higher-ups were errors wouldn't happen she actually named her program “Forget It.” But failures did happen. And her mindset, and discipline sent men to the Moon.
Her Apollo software was built to expect the unexpected, and on Apollo 11 it recognized an overload mid-landing and kept the critical tasks running.
Every postmortem, every bug tracker, every “let’s make sure this never happens again” carries a little of her in it.
Thank you, and rest in peace, Margaret Hamilton 🚀
ALT The famous photo of Margaret with the code she wrote to put a man on the moon
ALT The lego set of Margaret Hamilton my daughters gave me
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
The secret to getting off of calls you don't want to be on is to hang up in the middle of your own sentence. Only a maniac would hang up on themselves, so you must have gotten disconnected.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
I’m in love with this sentence:
“There is no secret trick. You have to feel the discomfort and still move forward.”
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
You can be tired, but you'll never be as tired as an indoor cat who's slept for 18 hours, eaten three meals, looked out the window for five minutes, and decided it's time for another nap.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
Underrated life advice: Make yourself easy to root for. Be kind. Be reliable. Celebrate other people’s wins. Work hard without complaining. Carry good energy into rooms. You'll be shocked by how many doors open for you by making life better for others.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
May is mental health awareness month.
So much people are struggling mentally, depressed and drained and trying their best not to take their lives.
Please check on your friends, check on your quiet coursemate and colleagues.
You matter and you are loved. You’re not alone.❤️
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
So thrilled to celebrate #Apple50 with @paulmccartney! His music has inspired us from the beginning, so this is a full circle moment to close out our celebrations. Thank you, Paul, for proving that when you think different, you have the power to change the world.
ALT Sir Paul McCartney on stage at Apple Park, playing guitar and pointing to the sky, with a large “50” behind him embroidered on the Apple logo.
Alena Prokharchyk retweeted
I have kids. I work in AI every day. And honestly? I have no idea what their careers will look like in 15 years. But I know what will carry them through.
First, and this might sound unromantic: make money and save it for them. We can debate educational philosophy all day, but the world is changing so fast that financial security might be the most practical gift we can give. Buy some gold bars. Seriously.
Second, nurture their imagination. AI rewards people with initiative and wild ideas. The kid who daydreams, who asks weird questions, who wants to try ten things at once? That kid will thrive. AI can execute. AI can be disciplined. What AI can't do is dream up something nobody's thought of before.
Third, build resilience. There are no more iron rice bowls (guaranteed lifetime jobs). Any stable, predictable job is exactly the kind of job AI will learn to replace. Our kids will likely switch directions many times in their lives. Learn something new, get replaced, pivot, repeat. It's more like being a hunter than a farmer. Schools don't teach this. Schools teach you to follow a linear path: high school, college, grad school, stable job. That linear path is becoming the most dangerous one.
Last, invest in their ability to connect with other humans. Not networking. Not schmoozing. Real emotional connection. Building trust, offering support, making people feel seen. As AI handles more of the rational, analytical work, the human ability to genuinely relate to other humans becomes more rare and more valuable.
I don't have all the answers. But I know that imagination, resilience, and genuine human warmth aren't going out of style anytime soon.
#AI #Parenting #Education #FutureOfWork
